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Goblins
Reviews Summary C+VG Issue 3 Death can come swiftly at the hands of the little creatures who have lent their name to the adventure game Goblins. The game runs on a 48K Apple and is one of the growing stable of graphically illustrated adventure games from the U.S. firm of Highlands Computer Services. As with most adventure games the object is to wander around an imaginary stretch of countryside littered with valuable and magical items, horrendous monsters and rather nasty traps, with the intention of emerging from the trip both somewhat richer and still in one piece. Goblins follows this now traditional mould. The player has to pit his wits against a variety of traps and monsters and accumulate a score, judged, in a fairly arbitrary way, by the computer. The game makes use of the Apple's hi-resolution graphics capabilities by displaying to the player a scene representing that faced by the adventurer, and there is even an occasional piece of animation thrown in for good measure. Unfortunately one limitation of the graphics is that the scene displayed does not always correspond accurately to the choice of directions available. Every so often during the course of the game, the player catches a glimpse of, what I at first took to be, a demented rabbit but what is, in fact, one of the goblins mentioned in the title of the game. And on occasion (usually if your adventurer has been loitering about in the same location for more than a couple of moves) the goblin rushes towards you — with a good chance of killing your adventurer stone dead on the spot. It's a fault of which a number of adventure games suffer but Goblins is particularly infuriating for the number of times the player finds his adventurer confronted with a sudden and arbitrary death. Maybe it was the aftershave some of my adventurers were wearing, but a succession of them were dispatched by vicious goblins without so much as a warning glimpse that one was in the vicinity. The game also features several fatal traps which result either in instant (and unprovoked) death or a situation involving little prospect of escape. The fairest, and most imaginative, death I suffered was whilst sinking in quicksand responding to the program's (unhelpful) advice to lighten my load I foolishly dropped some limes I had found earlier in the expedition, only to suffer fatally as they turned the quicksand to quick-setting cement! Mind you, if you find you are doing well in the course of a game. Goblins does allow you to save the game in progress on disc. Goblins is not without its fair share of bugs. The command "look down" generated the puzzling response "The title is 'Igpa Atlina' " I found later in the game a book where this same response more appropriately resulted from the command "read cover". I also found other problems with the Egyptian Scarab object. Goblins will doubtless be very popular with keen adventure games players — although I found it a good deal less addictive than most adventures. The game comes with no instruction leaflet and only very brief instructions on disc. It costs £15.95. Category:Apple II Games Category:C+VG Reviews Category:Highland Computer Services